To step into the discreetly illumined rooms of the major new Byzantine exhibition at the Met is to experience, with a gentle shock, some of the wide-eyed wonder which early visitors to the court at Constantinople felt well over a millennium ago.1 When the priest Liutprand of Cremona, serving as an envoy from a Western potentate, had an audience with Constantine VII in the year 949, he was amazed to see the Byzantine emperor suddenly hoisted skyward on his throne by means of some hidden mechanical device and, indeed, to such a height that poor awed Liutprand could not converse with him. Moreover, as he tells us, “before the emperor’s seat stood a tree, made of bronze gilded over, whose branches were filled with birds, also made of gilded bronze, which uttered different cries, each according to its varying species.” Such marvels of ostentation inspired rivalry as well as admiration. At around the same time, Byzantine ambassadors to Abbasid Baghdad were escorted from palace to palace, each one more magnificent than the last, until they reached the caliphal palace and, finally, the aptly named Palace of the Tree. There in a wide pool stood a tree with eighteen branches on which sat “all sorts of gold and silver birds, both large and small.” The tree itself was made of gold and silver, with colored leaves that stirred at every touch of the wind, while the gilt birds chirped and sang.

These reports, cited in Gustave von Grunebaum’s classic Medieval Islam of 1946, still one of the best brief accounts of Byzantine-Muslim relations, came to mind as I moved through the exhibition. Yeats’s famous lines from “Sailing to Byzantium” were, perhaps irresistibly, rattling around in my memory too:

The Met’s exhibition does bring Yeats’s Byzantium to mind, but only initially. Almost every piece in the exhibition challenges his assumptions. Not only are many of the objects diminutive, but they are far from being “out of nature”—no bird-filled trees of gilded bronze, and certainly no elevator-thrones, but, instead, delicate carvings of ivory and bone, incised plates of chased silver, lustrous coins, and fragments of mosaics. The figures, the animal forms, and the sinuous foliage are highly stylized yet all display a brimming vitality. Each is quite distinctly a “natural thing” though captured from a perspective unfamiliar to us. These are works that are intensely physical—many seem crafted for the sheer pleasure of touch. But at the same time, even the humblest of them—ewers and braziers, aquamanilia (water-jugs to you and me), tunics and wall-hangings—are suffused with a palpable spirituality. Here Byzantine ostentation is subtly muted, though no less impressive for that. In the Met’s exhibition, magnificence is often miniaturized, captured in small, fragile objects, many intended for household or everyday use: Alongside delicate earrings and luxurious tunics, we find such humdrum items as a sixth-century receipt for a shipment of garments and an order for veils from a merchant in Fayyum, both penned on tattered papyrus in business-like Greek and Arabic script, respectively. And in all these objects, the same abundant sense of life, the same craftsmanship, and the same refinement of style are unmistakably apparent.

The exhibition is arranged to encompass the two extremes—Byzantium at the start and Islam at the finish—with “Commerce” providing a transitional link between the two; by this simple scheme, the exhibition enables us to trace the evolution of a distinctive sensibility and a pervasive style, both as it manifests itself in Byzantine creations and as it steadily spreads among Jews and Copts and Muslims, among others, in the farther reaches of the empire. What becomes ever clearer, in object after object, is that such terms as “influence” are far too crude to apply to this Byzantine diffusion of style and design. In the excellent wall-texts, links are suggested but often, quite refreshingly, they are left for us to infer. We come to realize that in this “age of transition,” the borders of neighboring cultures were exceptionally porous; there were unexpected affinities, spiritual as well as cultural, between such unremitting enemies as the Byzantines and the Umayyad or Abbasid caliphs. And the latter, having assimilated Byzantine models, in turn propagated their own style. To give one example, in the so-called “First Gaster Bible” from the ninth or tenth century, of which only forty leaves survive, the design of the pages and its Hebrew text are strikingly similar to contemporaneous Koran designs, not only in the floral and geometrical motifs that adorn the pages, but in the script itself; the letters have the blockiness of early Arabic Kufic calligraphy and show the same tendency to elongate certain letters: the Hebrew letter lamed thus stretches its stem like a giraffe’s neck high over the dense hedges of the text. Something more intimate than “influence” seems at work; these are “correspondences,” hidden kinships.

Muslim armies campaigned for centuries to take Constantinople—and on at least three occasions almost succeeded. This was not only for obvious territorial and military reasons, but also because Byzantium was “Rome”—Rum in Arabic (pronounced as “room”)—and so the ultimate imperial prize, conferring the legitimacy of history on any power strong enough to seize it. It is one of the surprises of the exhibition to observe how even while hostilities raged, the Byzantine example, in architecture and design, continued to infiltrate and shape the cultural aspirations of its adversaries, and was in turn transformed and passed on to others.

I felt a bit like old Liutprand of Cremona myself as I toured the exhibition; here was a succession of astonishments. Some of the smaller examples of Byzantine refinement are especially compelling, such as the modestly labelled “Textile Fragment with a Tree,” on loan from the Louvre.

This is a fragment of a tapestry weave of wool and linen, probably of Egyptian provenance and dating from sometime in the sixth or seventh century, perhaps the surviving remnant of a wall hanging. It depicts a pomegranate tree with dark green upswept leaves edged in white and festooned with six maroon and pink pomegranates. The three branches of the tree are a rich brown and cup the foliage to create a strangely chalice-like effect; above, a sprig with a single pomegranate floats aloft. Though the tree appears almost emblematic and flat as an appliqué, it rustles with energy, not only because of the vigorous modeling of the climbing branches, but also because the three bold colors of the image consort so vibrantly with one another. In its dense and bristling plumpness, the tree seems an image of plenty, of earthly abundance; since the pomegranate was long associated with immortality, the image also suggests some vivid foretaste of paradise. By nibbling away the borders and riddling the fabric with holes, time has inadvertently strengthened the image. It now seems to stand as one of those tiny triumphs artistry occasionally achieves over time, blossoming amid tatters. Here again, the wall text, like the catalogue—itself a beautiful and quite sumptuous work of original scholarship—makes another of those apt connections that characterizes the exhibition from start to finish. We are directed to the mosaics of the late seventh-century Umayyad Mosque in Damascus (like the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, also designed on Byzantine models) where another exuberant tree, with obvious affinities to our pomegranate, rises on the western courtyard wall. The visual lineage is immediately apparent.

Sometimes a parallel is not drawn explicitly but presses itself upon the viewer. Such is the case of the Naples Dioscurides, a sixth- or seventh-century Italian manuscript of the botanical and herbal manual of the first-century Greek author Dioscurides; the lovely depictions of plants, from root to leaf-top, are less stylized than our little pomegranate tree but display the same rich hues and attention to pattern. The way in which the illustrations of the plants surmount the uncial Greek calligraphy, with its red headings and black columns of text, combines twining natural forms with rigid geometric lines and so prefigures later designs in friezes and facades. This is a scientific treatise, an aid to the identification of medicinal plants, which would be immensely influential in later centuries, in both the Byzantine and Muslim worlds, and yet it too seems animated by a sense of irrepressible abundance. Again and again, such links are noted or implied, not simply as instances of artistic influence but as points of affinity between otherwise disparate and, indeed, warring cultures.

Sometimes a parallel is not drawn explicitly but presses itself upon the viewer.

When I spoke with Dr. Helen C. Evans, the curator for Byzantine Art at the Met, about such correspondences in the exhibition, she replied rather mischievously that she expected the exhibition “to be equally irritating to all.” Why, you might wonder, should such a show be irritating to anyone? She also told me that she hoped the exhibition would prompt people “to go out and ask questions”—would be, in other words, a source of fruitful irritation, the kind that sparks our curiosity. In this, she and her colleagues have certainly succeeded.

As Evans well knows—she was the curator of the Met’s three previous Byzantine exhibitions—her subject is a minefield, especially because of the period it covers. The period between the seventh and ninth centuries was certainly an “age of transition,” as the title of the show rather coyly phrases it, but it was also an age of violent upheaval, of fierce doctrinal disputes, and of a protracted struggle for supremacy, particularly between Byzantines and Sasanian Persians, and then later between Byzantines and Muslims. While the Byzantine emperor Heraclius was battling to recapture Jerusalem against the Persians under Khusraw II, whose army had seized the holy city and the “True Cross” in 614, a new and unexpected power was emerging in the Arabian Peninsula, a power of which the Byzantines and Sasanians seemed blithely unaware; as Heraclius struggled to retake Jerusalem, finally succeeding in 629, the Prophet Muhammad was consolidating his new community of believers in Mecca and Medina. And shortly after Muhammad’s death in 632, the Arab conquests began. In less than a decade, the Byzantines lost Syria, Palestine, and Arabia, as well as such major cities as Damascus, Jerusalem, and Alexandria to the Arabs; and in 651, the same Arab armies would hunt down and butcher Yazdegerd III, the last Sasanian emperor, and destroy his empire forever. Still, the Arab forces never succeeded in taking Constantinople; that was left to the Turks under Mehmet the Conqueror in 1453.

Certain potential pitfalls may seem minor enough. Thus, as Evans told me, there was the question of whether to refer to certain early Christians as “Monophysites” or “Miaphysites.” This seems trivial but it is not, especially not to Miaphysites, represented today by the Coptic, Syrian, and Ethiopian Orthodox churches, among others. Mia-
physites, adhering to the formulation of St. Cyril of Alexandria, affirm Christ’s hypostatic union, a union equally human and divine, whereas Monophysites emphasize Christ’s divine nature into which, they believe, his human nature was subsumed. The exhibition, as in the beautiful Al-Mu’allaqa lintel from eighth-century Cairo, quite correctly opts for “Miaphysite.” Even so, such fine ancient distinctions still bristle with contention.

I suspect that one source of irritation, fruitful or not, may lie in the presentation of the Syrian Umayyads. The Umayyads have been roundly reviled by later generations of Muslims, and especially, though not exclusively, by Shi’ites. After the murder of Ali, the fourth caliph (and the Prophet Muhammad’s cousin and son-in-law), in 661, the caliphate was seized by his arch-enemy Mu’awiya, the founder of the Umayyad dynasty. For the ninety years of their rule, the Umayyads were widely detested, not only for their brutal repressive measures but for their cronyism and nepotism; this was the “Arab Kingdom” in which family and tribal ties counted for more than piety or merit. The Umayyads were condemned, too, for their dissolute behavior. If we are to credit later, gleefully scurrilous accounts, some of which would have made Suetonius blush, the wine-bibbing caliph Walid II (reigned 743–44) led an exceptionally uproarious life. Thus, we read that during one of his binges he used a copy of the Koran for target practice; on another occasion, he had his court jester, the irrepressible Ash’ab, dress up in a monkey costume and perform obeisances to the caliphal membrum virile, shamelessly erect and on full display. Such shenanigans on the part of “the shadow of God on earth,” as the caliph was titled, did not sit well with the pious.

Byzantium and Islam” includes a high number of outright masterpieces.

From the Met’s exhibition, we get a different, a more nuanced, impression of these reprobates, an impression tinged with a certain poignancy. The same Walid II commissioned the truly magnificent desert palace known as Mshatta, the ruins of which lie south of modern Amman. This is the largest of some thirty-five identified Umayyad desert palaces; contrary to conventional notions of Islamic practice, some of these, like Qusayr ’Amra, also in Jordan, feature frescoes depicting half-clad dancing girls, at least one of whom is unabashedly topless as she gyrates. The Met’s exhibit of Mshatta takes this even further. The largest and most impressive examples of Mshatta’s majestic limestone walls, with their mazy and intricate carvings of birds and animals lurking amid quite Byzantine curlicues of vine, are to be found in Berlin’s Pergamon Museum. But amid the Met’s three lovely fragments, there stands the single “Female Torso.” Only her right arm, her ample midriff, and the tops of her thighs have survived; her garments are gathered in folds below her sex, fully bared to the gaze. She has the chubby belly-folds and fingers “thick as sand grubs” so prized by early Arab poets who found well-padded women irresistibly sexy—a taste shared by the ever horny Umayyads. Suddenly, we find ourselves in a time prior to the ban on images, or the dour hijab, or even enforcement of the prohibition on wine. This is another Islam, one we don’t recognize. Yes, the Umayyads were brutal and corrupt; and yes, they fit the contemptuous dismissal that Saint Thomas Aquinas centuries later applied to them and their successors in his Summa contra Gentiles (though he drew avidly on their works), calling them homines bestiales in deserto morantes (“bestial desert-dwelling men”). Nevertheless, the Met’s displays of their works reveal an unexpected—a quite Byzantine—joie de vivre in their remnants. There is something oddly moving, some faint festive echo of antiquity, in their frank devotion to pleasure.

Byzantium and Islam” includes a high number of outright masterpieces. The “Grado Chair,” with its finely carved ivory panels depicting scenes from the life of Christ and the lives of the saints—one of which graces the dust-jacket of the Met’s exhibition catalogue—is stunningly beautiful. As is the sequence of six silver plates, made in Constantinople in the same year as Heraclius was recapturing Jerusalem, that depicts the life of David. These superb objects were presumably crafted to honor Heraclius himself, seen as a “second David.” All six, whether depicting David anointed by Samuel or David battling a lion (perhaps an allusion to Hercules, to whom Heraclius was also likened, or even the heraldic lion of the Sasanians), are exquisitely made. But the most impressive is surely the largest plate, some nineteen and a half inches in diameter, which illustrates the contest between David and Goliath. The plate is sectioned into three zones; in the uppermost, David and Goliath stand face-to-face, perhaps taunting each other like boxers before a match; in the central panel, the largest, the two are engaged in battle with Goliath aiming his spear and David, not “unarmed,” as the catalogue describes him, but readying his sling. In the lower panel, David is sawing Goliath’s head off with grim gusto, while the weapons of both lie strewn about them. This intensely dynamic composition creates an illusion of simultaneity; every line is delicately rendered and yet each scene pulses with energy.

In his 1929 study The Byzantine Achievement, Robert Byron—he of The Road to Oxiana fame—noted that the Byzantines were “the most perfect artificers of pattern that have ever been.” The Met’s exhibition proves him right. As I suggested earlier, such a love and mastery of pattern, seen from the perspective of Late Antiquity, really has nothing “unnatural” about it. It represents a different vision of nature. For the Byzantines, as for the Muslims who emulated their art and architecture, nature was an expression of a divine geometry, of the precise and ascertainable order that governed the shapes and patterns of things. It was as evident in the immutable structure of the heavens as in the coiling forms of a vine. The fact that that perception led eventually in Islamic art and architecture, under the impetus of the Byzantine model, to an increasing emphasis on geometrical patterns—to the arabesque, or the strict proportions of calligraphic inscriptions, or the stalactite vaults of mosque ceilings—was but a logical extension of this precept.